An emergency worker walks past a pile of cars from an accident in Texas on Nov. 22. / Guiseppe Barranco, AP

by Larry Copeland, @ByLarryCopeland, USA TODAY

by Larry Copeland, @ByLarryCopeland, USA TODAY

Nearly a decade of declining road deaths has created complacency among state lawmakers, whose failure to enact stronger highway-safety laws leaves motorists at peril now that traffic fatalities are rising again.

That's according to Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a non-profit group that grades the states annually on how well they are implementing a set of 15 laws governing everything from seat-belt use to drunken and distracted driving and teen driving safety.

In December, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released preliminary data showing that road deaths in the first nine months of 2012 rose 7.1% over the same period in 2011 - the largest year-over-year jump for that period since 1975.

"We've all become sort of complacent in putting new laws on the books because highway deaths were going down," said Jacqueline Gillan, president of Washington, D.C.-based Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. "I think this is a real wake-up call."

A decade of dropping highway fatalities - coupled with an anti-government mood in many state capitals - might have led state legislators to conclude that there was no more work to be done, says Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

In 2010, state legislatures around the USA enacted 22 new traffic-safety laws, Gillan said; last year, they passed just 10. None of the 18 states without primary seat-belt laws, which allow police to stop motorists who aren't buckled up instead of citing them only when they're pulled over for something else, enacted one.

While no state has adopted all 15 laws recommended by Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, 14 states were graded as "significantly advanced" toward adopting the laws. Six states were marked as falling "dangerously behind."

One of them, Nebraska, received a poor grade because its seat belt and texting-while-driving laws are secondary offenses, meaning a police officer has to pull a motorist over for something else before citing them for those violations, said Fred Zwonechek, the state's highway-safety administrator.

"They (Advocates) look at the rating based on public policy and not on performance," he said. "When we look at performance, Nebraska stacks up very well in terms of declining crash rates, fatality rates and overall we tend to compare very favorably to the rest of the nation in most categories."